Introduction to Databases
When we talk about databases, we mean both data and schema (how data is structured). Databases are widely used in all aspects of our lives for customer records, accounting and other record keeping purposes.Databases are run by database management systems (DBMS), which help define new schema, insert/modify/delete data and retrieve data as well as deal with data security and miscellaneous administrative tasks pertaining to database performance.
In this course, we are using the Lahman Database of baseball statistics.
Why not just use something like Excel?
Because we would run into limitations in:
- Record size (Excel only allows ~1 million rows, and can get very slow with far less.)
- Number of users/editors (Excel is only built for 1 user. Spreadsheets can be shared via email, but this becomes a problem when they are frequently modified.)
- Types of information (Excel is designed for numeric data.)
- Report generation (Excel is great at answering simple questions, but custom reports can quickly get complicated.)
Databases allow:
- Larger record sizes (Databases are designed to efficiently use a computer’s resources. A database with millions of rows is often considered small.)
- Many users/editors (Databases are often hosted on central servers for shared access. In this class, over 10,000 of you will be working on the same database!)
- Different types of information (Most databases handle numbers, texts, and dates well. More specialized databases can handle things like location data and graphs.)
- Flexible report generation (Databases are designed to easily run complex “queries.” A query can be thought of as a question asked to the database.)